


Bug-Out

by justalittlegreen



Series: Sunshine and Filth [4]
Category: MASH (1970), MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-10 01:24:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16460789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justalittlegreen/pseuds/justalittlegreen
Summary: Hawkeye hides things in books.(insert standard intellectual property disclaimer here)





	1. Chapter 1

The minute Colonel Potter tells Hawkeye he’s going to be doing that spinal cord injury, bug-out or no bug-out, Hawkeye shuts down. It’s like being in the middle of a complex surgery before it even begins – when panic threatens to overcome his focus, he chases it with a joke, using punchlines to keep him tethered to his hands, the patient, the problems in front of him. 

_You’ll do your best, Pierce,_ Potter says to him before he leaves. No more, no less. Hawkeye barely hears him. 

As the shells start landing, Hawkeye looks up at his team: Margaret and BJ at the ready. He almost wants to say something before they begin – a prayer, an invocation, a pep talk. But nothing comes. He settles for acknowledging the intimacy of the moment by calling her Margaret instead of Nurse when he needs more retraction, more suction. He meets BJ’s eyes over their masks and BJ gives him a long and reassuring glance. Hawkeye takes a steadying breath and dives into the man’s spine as the O.R. begins to dissolve around them.

Once the operation is finished, Hawk collapses into the last of the 4077’s folding chairs. BJ says something about going to pack. Hawkeye can’t think about packing – his brain is a sheaf of numbers and punchlines, all recall and reflex. Margaret looks at BJ with some degree of worry, but BJ assures her he’ll take care of Hawkeye’s things.

*

BJ’s first concern, of course, is the still. Frank’s arguments are little more than mosquitoes of annoyance – he knows he’ll get it out somehow. You can do anything in this country with the right connections. He’s mostly concerned about damage. That still, he knows, is more than his and Hawkeye’s sanity-saving source of general oblivion. It’s Hawkeye’s last connection to Trapper, to whom BJ will forever be a little indebted. A little in awe. Maybe even a hair jealous. If he shipped out tomorrow, what would Hawkeye have to remember him by?

Once the still problem is resolved (bless that clever little clerk!), BJ turns his attention to packing Hawkeye’s things. His own things barely fill a locker and a duffel – even the most precious of his letters from home (which is to say, all of them) are tucked neatly into the crisp folds of his Class A’s.

Hawkeye’s belongings, on the other hand, have accumulated and sprawled during his year in the war. It’s hard to know what’s worth keeping, or what would be some precious memento that happened to look like garbage. BJ opens Hawk’s locker and pauses. It feels almost intrusive. Hawkeye never uses this thing; he prefers his laundry in piles, and often sleeps in a nest of his own fatigues. BJ’s seen every stitch of clothing both on and off Hawkeye’s body, but seeing it tucked away feels more intimate.

Or stuffed away, more like it. BJ knows he shouldn’t be surprised when he opens the locker to find fourteen nudie magazines – and not gathering dust, either. Recently read nudie magazines. He finds himself paging through a few, simultaneously calculating how he can use this to embarrass Hawkeye later, and wondering if Hawkeye would notice one going missing. He starts putting clothes into the locker, grabbing pile after pile, throwing filthy clothes in with merely dirty ones. He doesn’t want to grab the last pile – there is some kind of STENCH coming from those socks – but he sees something he hasn’t seen before. A book, peeking out from under the pile.  
He grabs it. It’s a medical textbook, but not one he’s seen Hawk consult before. And it doesn’t seem to be very relevant to their work at the 4077 – it’s a cardiology text. Maybe it was Trapper’s. Maybe it’s Frank’s. BJ opens the cover and is stunned to find Hawk’s barely-legible scrawl filling the endpapers. He flips through more and there’s writing everywhere, in all the margins.

And then he sees his name, and everything stops.


	2. In the Margins

_There’s no telling what would’ve happened after I lost Trapper if I hadn’t found BJ the very same day. I was ready to drown more than my sorrows in that bar at Kimpo, but that Rudyard Kipling line made me sit up and take notice._

_It was like seeing a lighthouse when you’re convinced you’ll die on the ocean. In that moment, I started pouring hope into him. I shouldn’t have. Odds are, it was a terrible idea. But it’s an inexplicable luck – Mulcahey would call it a blessing – that it actually worked. That peach-fuzzed California boy is a ray of goddamn sunshine._

_And damn, if he hasn’t led me to solid ground._

BJ stops. He couldn’t know. How could he know? Kimpo was his own private tornado, his very own storm – disoriented and disheveled, only the creases of his dress uniform held him together in his first hours in Korea. And yet, he knows that Hawk wouldn’t be surprised if he admitted he spent most of their first hours together trying to figure out how to slip away and hop a plane back to California.  
He flips further into the book, finds a blank page in between chapters that is filled with cramped, tight scrawl. The enlisted men are coming in around him, pulling down the walls of the tent. Radar comes in to get the still, and BJ pretends he’s looking under his cot for something while he reads.

_It wouldn’t be very, well, **me** of me to admit that you’re not the only one who ended up spilling his guts over his first skirmish. When I saw you bent over in that field, I remembered my first all-nighter in the OR as the wounded kept coming and coming and I stopped being able to feel my feet. Or anything. Until the last stitch was in and I staggered around the back and heaved my guts into a rat nest. It probably wouldn’t shock you either to know that Trapper was right behind me with a hand on my back. _

At this point, BJ realizes he’s reading more than a diary – it’s a _letter. To him._ A letter he isn’t supposed to be reading, but this new and unexplored dimension of Hawkeye is too much to resist. He flips to another chapter entirely, burning with curiosity. 

_I love you like I love home. You keep me from drifting into that dark night on the water as much as the Crabapple Cove newspaper. Sometimes I feel like the darkness and filth that’s grown in me here is a part of me that I’ll never be able to shake. But you haven’t stopped shining yet. And that keeps me solid. Here. Whole._

BJ slams the book shut and for the first time, realizes what it means that he’s leaving Hawkeye behind. Realizes that he, too, has been holding on to his tentmate for more than just stability. His head whirls and only Frank’s yappy shouting and stupid whistle reminds him that he needs to get up and move. 


	3. Out, Bug, Black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BJ worries about Hawkeye. Margaret and Hawkeye connect while sitting vigil with a patient.

The implications of what he's done - what he's doing - hits him as the last of the convoy rumbles out of the 4077. He, Margaret and Radar watch the last clouds of dust disappear from the doorway of the OR. Now, the waiting truly begins.

As the shelling starts coming faster and faster, the jokes are flying from Hawkeye, who feels like he's trying to dance to the rhythm of the shots - if he can stay ahead of them, keep mind on the next punchline, maybe they can evade the blasts. It's panic logic, survival logic. It's driving Margaret crazy. She copes by checking the patient over and over again, reporting every millimeter of improvement as the patient slowly starts wiggling his toes.

Radar sitting in the corner with his knees to his chest, bursts into tears right before a grenade goes off right outside their window. The tin walls rattle like a snare drum. Radar starts panicking, breathing in short, labored spurts. 

_Margaret!_ hisses Hawkeye as loudly as he dares.  _Get over here, we need some help._

She crawls across the floor, and sidles up on the other side of Radar. She and Hawkeye glance at each other and know it's up to her. Hawkeye cajoles. Major Houlihan gives orders.

_Corporal, I want you to breathe in on my count. One...two...three...four. Now out - same way. One...two..._

Radar tries, but his whole body is wracked with shivering. Hawkeye manuvers himself behind the - boy, it will always be boy - and pulls Radar's head to his chest.

_Can you hear my heartbeat, Radar? Can you count my pulse?_

The wooly-capped head nods against his torso. 

_Good, because I'm going to time you for one minute, and in that minute, you need to tell me how many beats you hear. This is a very important exam, because if you fail it, they're going to take away your medical license. Okay? Go._

Margaret lifts her watch and makes a show of watching it. Slowly, Radar's breathing slows to sync with Hawkeye's. Margaret slips her fingers over Radar's wrist and nods, shooting Hawkeye a grateful look.

_Well, what's the verdict, doctor?  Do I need a whole new ticker, or do I just have to wind it more regularly?_

Radar offers a small smile at Hawkeye's attempt.  _I think you just need to get out of enemy territory and you'll be just fine, sir._

Hawkeye squeezes Radar one more time, then lets him go with a gentle slap on the arm.  _Well, I don't know about you, but the room service in this establishment leaves much to be desired. Major, see to it that we issue a most strongly-worded complaint? Meanwhile, there's a case of surplus vienna sausages with our names on it. Who's ready for dinner?_

_**_

BJ wishes he'd stuck himself at the back of the line with Klinger's dresses and Radar's pet goat. Riding next to Frank, whose sense of self-importance is so inflated BJ's surprised he hasn't floated straight out of the jeep, is an exercise in the worst kind of patience. In an effort to tune out Frank's mosquito-like whining, BJ tries to go to Mill Valley in his head. He concentrates on the image of Peg in her bathrobe at the kitchen table, Peg on a ladder fixing a gutter pipe, Peg putting gas in the car, Peg pouring herself a drink, Peg -

_Hawkeye, sitting on the floor, head leaning on the sole patient cot left in the OR, passed out with exhaustion._

_Hawkeye, curled up and furiously scribbling in the margins of the textbook._

_Hawkeye waiting, scared._

BJ shudders. Where the hell did these thoughts come from? Think of Erin. Think of your sweet baby, and her fat, beautiful cheeks. Try to find the exact sound of her cooing in your memory. Try -

_Hawkeye, huddled in the corner while the bombs fall._

_Hawkeye, scared and alone._

_Hawkeye, sleeping peacefully in The Swamp._

BJ doesn't know what to do with the sudden, irrevocable ache in his chest. He looks around for a way to keep himself from flinging himself out of the jeep and running back to the 4077, and settles on stealing Frank's cap and hiding it for the duration of the ride.

**

_Hawkeye, stop that!_

_...I'm gonna go sleep in the jeep._

Two hours later, and the shelling has slowed to a crawl. Even if there were any lights left to turn on, they'd keep them off to avoid attention.

_Radar? Radar? Come on, don't stay outside. I was just horsing around._

_No thank you sirs, I mean sir and ma'am. I'm going to sleep on the floor of the jeep and I'll be safer there, I think. Really. I'm okay._

Hawkeye feels Margaret shrug next to him. What's the worst that can happen out there that's not worse than being behind these thin walls? He hears Margaret sigh, low and steady.

_What is it?_ he asks, low and quiet. More serious than she's ever heard him speak outside of a surgery.

_I keep thinking -_

 -  _you can't think like that, Margaret. I mean it. You start going down that road and you'll worry yourself to death. Damnit, why did they take all the phenobarb?_

_I can't help it; I'm scared. You don't know what it's like for women out there._

Hawkeye sighs.

_No. You're right. But listen, I promise that if it's your virtue or my life, I'll go first._

_Don't talk like that._

_I won't if you won't._

_Deal._

_Deal._

_..._

_..._

_Margaret?_

_What?_

_I'm going to lie down now. And I'm going to take you with me._

He hears her nodding. He lies with his back to the wall, and Margaret curls up against his chest. His arm falls across her belly. 

_How do you do that?_

_do what?_

_Make your hair still smell like honeydew or something when you haven't showered in seventeen hours._

_A woman never tells, Hawkeye._

She feels him grinning.

_Margaret?_

_what._

_Thank you for staying._

_It was my duty._

_Margaret?_

_what, Hawkeye._

_You're full of it._

 

 


End file.
